Dr. Heather Robinson

In 2024, a girlfriend asked me, 'When are you gonna do what you know you're supposed to do? It comes second nature to you.' When I asked what she was talking about, she said, 'You need to do a book.' That conversation pushed me to create what became the three-part Educators Rise Voices of Change anthology series. She saw something in me that I wasn't fully embracing - that this work of bringing educators together and giving them a voice was what I was meant to do, even though I'm a teacher by trade and didn't anticipate that being the route I would go.

There are so many gaps in education right now. Teachers don't feel like parents want to come together and work with them as a team, they don't feel like they're getting the support of their administrators, and administrators are saying they don't feel like teachers are being forthcoming with the support they need. There's burnout on both sides - administration and teachers - and teachers feel there's a lack of support or wanting to come together from parents, where it's like you just rush and drop off and rush and pick up. But it's not that parents don't want to be a part of it - either they don't know what to do, or they feel offended because of the way things are being presented. Educators are saying they feel burned out, they're not being heard, they're not being valued. Students are feeling a certain way too. In a public school kindergarten classroom with 30 students, you might have 5 above average, 7 below average, and 18 on target. The average teacher working by themselves doesn't have the capacity to individualize lessons for three parts in one classroom. The ones on target are bored because they have to be held back to catch up those below target, and the advanced ones are having behavior issues because no one is meeting them where they are. We're talking about the difference between equality and equity - equality is doing a professional development day and training everyone on the same thing, but equity is observing individually, finding out where the weaknesses are, and helping in those areas. It's not one size fits all, it's about meeting people individually where they are. The direction we're going is not good. The way education is highlighted is very lukewarm - we don't have people actually delving into what's working or how we can do things differently. That notion that it takes a village to raise a child has been thrown out the window because now everybody is either offended quickly - and that's not just the parents, that's also the teachers and administration. Everybody's kind of on edge trying to figure out how we could make this make sense.

The saying 'it takes a village to raise a child' is fundamental to everything I do. That village I actually had growing up - my father, my teachers, my IEP team, and my administration all came together to be my village when I had an IEP with 5 parts. I can honestly say, without my village coming up, I don't know where I would be. That's why I'm so passionate about bridging the gaps that separate us in education - bringing together parents, teachers, administrators, and students. It's about meeting people individually where they are, not one size fits all. I believe in giving a voice to teachers and creating a platform for them to utilize their voice so that we can enhance the experience for the teacher in the classroom, as well as the student in the classroom, which in turn enhances the experience of the parent. If you get the student as a teacher, you got the parent. But if they don't have that connection with their child, they're not gonna want nothing to do with these things. Teachers are the heartbeat of education - without teachers, schools can't function, daycares can't function. Being able to take it from not just a woman's perspective, but from a female teacher's perspective that had the IEP, that had the five sections, that knows what it's like to have a village and then knows the damage of not having a village - that's what drives me.